The Wall Street Journal is looking to launch its website in a range of foreign languages as the 118-year-old newspaper, owned by Dow Jones & Company, seeks to bolster its position outside its core US market.

The Wall Street Journal's publisher Gordon Crovitz also admitted that the company would be interested in buying the Financial Times should its owner Pearson ever put it up for sale, something that has been speculated about intensely in recent days but consistently denied by senior management. "If the FT ever were to come on the market we would look at it," he said. "But so far Pearson has [maintained] it's not for sale."

Pearson's chief executive, Dame Marjorie Scardino, once famously remarked that the FT would be sold "over my dead body" but after a decade at the helm of the media group, talk that she is working on a succession plan is growing louder. Rona Fairhead, seen as a possible successor, moved from being Pearson's finance head to boss of the FT Group last June and insiders believe she has been given 18 months to two years to show that the pink paper can make serious money or it will be sold off. It made a £5m profit in the first half of 2006 after climbing out of the red in the previous year. Rupert Murdoch has also long been seen as a potential buyer if the FT ever came up for sale, though he would almost certainly have to divest himself of The Times to gain approval.

There is an obvious fit between the FT and Journal. The Wall Street Journal is one of the US's top three newspapers, with more than 1.7m subscribers in the US, but its European and Asian editions have only about 100,000 each. The FT's moves into the US and Asia have also met with similarly mixed success.

Online battle

There had been speculation the Journal might pull out of Europe, where the financial newspaper market is split between the FT, which already has a German-language edition, and a number of local-language papers such as Handelsblatt in Germany and Les Echos in France, which is owned by Pearson.

But Mr Crovitz said there would be no retrenchment. Instead the battle for readers outside the US will increasingly take place online. "One question we are considering this year is, is there an opportunity in local markets in Europe and Asia to create locally oriented versions of the online journal," he told the Guardian. "I'm not saying that we wouldn't publish in the print medium but, from a business point of view, the costs of starting something online are infinitesimal. New technology allows risk-taking and experimentation."

It also plays to the strengths of the Dow Jones empire, he believes. The newswire already has journalists supplying news in 11 languages, from French and Russian to Arabic and Japanese, and it would not need much investment to adapt news for the internet. It already has a non-English version of its website: WSJ.com launched a Chinese language site in 2002 that now has more than 273,000 registered users and clocks up almost 3 million page views a month.

But unlike many news organisations who find that the transition from print to digital consists largely of turning newspaper reporters into digital journalists, the Journal's next phase of online growth is part of a major re-focusing of the newspaper itself. This month the Wall Street Journal revamped its US edition. It reduced the physical size of the paper and instituted an 80/20 rule. In essence, according to Mr Crovitz, 80% of the newspaper should be new, in-depth or exclusive reporting. "People want to know what the news means beyond what happened the day before," he said.

The WSJ is in something of a privileged position compared with many general news outlets - not only does it have a financial newswire that clients pay to use but WSJ.com readers stump up $99 a year for access. But the long-term survival of this niche is far from assured. Alan Flitcroft, UK head of media at Ernst & Young, stresses that "as soon as you can get information free from somewhere on the web it considerably weakens your ability to charge for content".

"To get people to pay for it you really have to be offering something that gives someone an edge," he says. "Either it gives you an edge because you are getting it sooner than the rest of the world, or it has such a level of research or sensitivity that it gives you something you can't get from surfing the web generally."

As more and more advertising moves online, there is the potential for other news organisations to enter the WSJ's space but without erecting a so-called "chargewall".

There is still an imbalance between the amount of time people spend with online media and the value of advertising spending that goes to websites, compared with newspapers and magazines. Print media get comparatively more ad spending for the reading time they command. In theory, money will over time flow from print media onto the web.

"The difficult question in all this," says Mr Flitcroft, "is whether the revenues you earn in the digital world will ever make up for the losses you have made in the physical world."

Backstory

Dow Jones & Company was founded in 1882 by Charles Dow, Edward Jones and Charles Bergstresser. They produced a daily news sheet and two years later started compiling an index of leading companies' share prices. In 1889 it was renamed the Wall Street Journal. It cost two cents for four pages. Clarence Barron, along with the editor, Thomas Woodlock, and Bergstresser, bought control in 1902 for $130,000, after Dow's death. Barron also founded Barron's magazine. The Bancroft family, Barron's heirs, in effect still control the firm. The Journal launched an Asian edition in 1976, a European paper in 1983 and its online edition in 1996.